On the evening of July 23, Solar, a new brand of the Solana Chinese community, officially organized the first Solar Community Solana Ecosystem Monthly Meeting. Lily Liu, Chairman of the Solana Foundation, attended the event and for the first time conducted in-depth exchanges with the entire Chinese community in Chinese through live broadcast.
Through this exchange, we can see that the Solana Foundation attaches great importance to the Chinese ecosystem, community, and developers. At the same time, Lily also repeatedly emphasized Solana’s vision as a value chain and the direction it hopes to promote during the live broadcast.
The following is a summary of the event:
QA Summary
Q1
Please let Lily introduce herself to our partners in the Chinese-speaking area:
A1
Hello everyone, I'm Lily, I'm the chairman of the Solana Foundation, I live in Europe now, I discovered Bitcoin 10 years ago in Shanghai, when blockchain was still just Bitcoin. Before I got into blockchain, I was doing more traditional financial work, I was born and raised in California, my family's ancestral home is in Hunan, then I went to Stanford and Harvard for college and graduate school, worked in investment banking at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong, then joined McKinsey, and also worked at private equity fund KKR. During the process, I probably worked in Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong for about 5 years, so I still have a better understanding of China, and even started my crypto journey here.
I heard about Bitcoin at my university alumni meeting 10 years ago, and I just thought it was a money laundering technology until I read the Bitcoin white paper. I read the Bitcoin white paper about 7/8 times before I had a deeper understanding of this industry and realized that this was a profound change. Now is my 10th year in this industry. My first blockchain project In 2018, we sold earn.com to Coinbase, and I started working on some other projects.
Three years ago, I learned about Solana and realized that it was the only technology that could match the user experience of web2. At that time, I was in San Francisco and met with the founder of Solana. I didn't expect that a few months later, I would start to join this community and even start to cooperate with the Solana Foundation. In the past few years, one of our focuses has been on how to help Solana build some communities of developers around the world. So I am very happy to have this opportunity to work with Adam, Daniel and Yaoyao to start building a community in the Chinese-speaking region.
Q2
The unique community culture has always been an important part of the Solana ecosystem that it is proud of. Many builders have established multiple decentralized communities around the world, including SuperTeam, to jointly promote the vigorous development of the Solana ecosystem. The recently launched Chinese community brand Solar will also be committed to creating a unique Solana community culture in the Chinese-speaking region. Please share your understanding of the Solana community culture as the chairman of the foundation, Lily, and why decentralized community building is so important?
A2
One of the biggest reasons why Solana attracted me was culture. In the past ten years, there have been many different blockchain projects, many good technologies and innovations, and many good facilities. But I think that blockchain is not just a technology. Blockchain itself is a culture and a community.
What is the core of building a very large and successful community? I think it is value. Establish a feasible and practical technology, build a good technology platform, and let technology developers use it to create applications. This application can bring value to users, and it is a value that web2 cannot achieve.
At the same time, this community is not just a place to chat. Building a community is more like building a small city. So from the beginning, we believed that Solana is not only a blockchain, nor is it just a technology platform. It is a concept of a city. We hope that it has both culture, facilities, economy, and internal values. We have always hoped to build our community in this way.
At the same time, in this community, all community members should uphold the concept of "ask not what the chain can do for you, but what you can do for your chain". We hope that our communities in various regions can contribute to our Solana city, and our Solana city can also bring good opportunities to our builders. In the past few years, we have many builders who have been contributing to the construction of this city, and they have also gained their own success in the process.
The success of a chain does not only depend on the foundation. The foundation is only doing part of the work in this regard. More investors, developers and users are attracted to this chain, which still mainly depends on our builders.
Q3
As one of the representative brands of the community, Superteam has achieved outstanding results worldwide. Now Solar is also about to embark on the journey of community building in the Chinese-speaking areas. I would like to ask Lily to share how you view the potential of the Chinese-speaking community? What are your expectations for the future development of Solar?
A3
I think the Chinese community is a very important community and a very important market for the entire blockchain and the entire global industry. I have always felt that there are two major markets in the blockchain, one is the English area, and the second is the Chinese area. The characteristics of the English area and the Chinese area are somewhat different. The English area is of course led by the United States, which is the largest developer community, but the second largest is the Chinese area. Some other differences are that I think the English area pays more attention to facilities. In the past 10 to 15 years, I think this is very helpful for some innovations. However, now I think that in this round, Ethereum has been doing some innovations in l2 and l3, but there is no matching user demand. I think it has been overheated. Some consumer applications that can really reach end consumers can run out in this bull market and truly promote large-scale application in the industry.
I think the most important thing for the Chinese-speaking region is the applications and application layers that are better. Solana can provide a ready-made and practical blockchain facility to support applications. I hope to start shifting some developers' time and attention from facilities to applications. In terms of applications, our largest global developer community should be in the Chinese-speaking region.
Q4
In your opinion, what are the key directions or events worth paying attention to in the second half of the year for Solana?
A4
I think each round has different focuses. For example, in the last round, people paid more attention to NFT and creators, but I think this round of bull market is more focused on some financial applications.
In fact, I think the core of blockchain itself is financial products. Its original value is financial relations. In 2015 and 2019, each round will make some innovations and advances in this aspect. I think there are several aspects this time that will bring some relatively large innovations to our entire industry:
One is payment. I think the reason why payment is more realistic now is because of the existence of Solana. Solana is now on a relatively large scale. What is related to payment is stablecoin. Stablecoin is very popular all over the world now. It used to be just USDT, but now USDC is also growing. There are many innovations in the stablecoin industry, and it is not only related to the US dollar.
Recently, a few weeks ago, new policies emerged in Europe. Now, they recognize stablecoins as a payment method related to cash in Europe. It also brings a great boost to the entire stablecoin and the entire blockchain industry. In Asia, there are also many stablecoin pilots. For example, in Hong Kong, there was some news last week that 3~4 companies officially started to conduct nuclear tests of stablecoins in Hong Kong. So I hope that there will be a KHD stablecoin next year.
We have already seen many new FinTech products, one of which is a stablecoin credit card. There are several companies currently working on such user financial applications. In fact, I entered the blockchain industry because I believe in such a global vision.
I think that it has not been possible in the past 15 years because Bitcoin is very expensive and slow, and it takes an hour to complete a transaction. Ethereum is of course a higher performance, but it also takes two minutes and two yuan to complete a general transaction, which cannot support any payment-related products.
In this round, we can finally realize the combination of payment platform and project strength, so as to realize more special applications that can only happen on blockchain. What Solana wants to do is to build a value chain from payment, stablecoin asset management and the entire financial-related products.
Q5
I recently saw that you mentioned the concept of PayFi at many important industry conferences. Could you introduce it to our partners in the Chinese-speaking region?
A5
I think Solana is the successor to Bitcoin's original vision. I don't think there is any other chain in the past that can now realize the vision that Bitcoin originally provided us.
When I first discovered Bitcoin, I read the white paper. The original vision of Bitcoin was to create a program money, program for money, micro payments, and a global financial system.
And what are the subsequent applications based on this vision? I think this is a very big task and a very big opportunity. Whether it is Solana, Bitcoin or Ethereum, it is something that the entire industry can do together. But so far, no other community, no other chain, or technology can do it.
I think PayFi is the vision that Bitcoin gives us.
We have talked about some specific examples of PayFi in the past. I think PayFi can start with a payment and a stable currency, and then start to make complex financial products on the chain. I think this is a very large market. Of course, these concepts already exist in traditional industries.
I believe that as a new industry, blockchain does not necessarily need to establish a completely new market. Instead, it can bring more valuable products and solutions to the existing market based on blockchain.
About Solar:
Solar is a new decentralized Solana Chinese community organization dedicated to promoting the vigorous development of the Solana ecosystem in the Chinese-speaking region and bringing Chinese power into the Solana ecosystem.
It is reported that in the past year, the Solana Chinese community has organized more than 100 online and offline activities in multiple cities in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and other places, gathered more than 1,500 high-quality Chinese developers, and promoted more than 250 Chinese projects to participate in the Solana hackathon. Solar will continue the vision of the Solana Chinese community, continue to empower the community, continue to organize various forms of ecological activities and localized developer education activities, and provide multi-faceted support for Chinese developers and entrepreneurs.
Currently, the Solar community is recruiting early community contributors, including technical experts, opinion leaders, community ambassadors, student ambassadors, etc. Community contributors will have the opportunity to deeply participate in the construction of the Solana ecosystem and have access to the Solana Foundation and first-line resources at home and abroad.
For more details, please follow Solar’s official Twitter: https://x.com/Solana_zh
